100 DAYS
In terms of how long it’d take to play everything, that’s how big my iTunes library is — rounding up, at least. 24,512 songs, 99.5 days, 179 and a half gigs. This is a problem in that it’s completely dicked over my listening habits. Both the least and yet, somehow, the crux of my worries is the space issue: my iPod is a 160GB model, and although I’ve managed to trim things down so that leaving off about 27 gigs worth of podcasts, audiobooks, comedy records and other miscellany means the actual music content can still fit, the remaining capacity for adding music is less than you could burn on a DVD. What this does for my listening habits is this: despite the fact that listening to new music is both a work and a recreational priority, I’m leery of adding new stuff, and once I do — listening, evaluating, then keeping the stuff I like while winnowing out the crap — there’s always the other two dozen thousand songs to worry about. I have designations for stuff I know is great and worth keeping forever, currently a few ticks past the 6,000 mark, but right now that leaves over 17,000 songs that I have probably liked at some point yet still need to do something about.
Here’s how I used to do things: every time I added an album or a bunch of tracks, I’d listen through the batch and do one of three things:
-Give it one star. This meant that I disliked it significantly and that it would have to go.
-Give it four/five stars. (Four means it’s a great downtempo/laidback track; five means it’s a great uptempo/amped-up track.) This would enshrine it in a pantheon of permanent favorites.
-Leave the rating blank. Neither favored nor unfavored, this simply meant that the track wasn’t something I’d specifically get the urge to listen to or have come up on a shuffled smart playlist of prioritized songs. But they weren’t bad enough to leave off entirely, either — who knows, maybe if I just bypassed the playlists and shuffled everything, I could get blindsided at the right moment by a song I hadn’t heard in the “right” way until that very instance and add it to the ranks of the favorite.
Unfortunately, this means I’ve had to contend with the fact that it’s not enough for me to tolerate a song or think it’s “pretty good” anymore — if I want to have the ability to consolidate everything I like right now and have enough room for stuff I’ll wind up liking in the future, I’ll need to reassess what it means to carry music around with me. There’s always limits, but now instead of the nuanced degrees of likability that fall between “FUCK THIS SHIT” and “ALL TIME GREAT,” I’ll need to go binary. If I can’t picture myself listening to a track all the way through without getting impatient, if I can’t imagine it improving my mood or dredging up some good, strong memories and associations, it’ll have to go. And it’ll be a ridiculously long process to do so; going through everything I haven’t committed myself to either loving or hating and figuring out whether it stays is going to take months upon months if I’m planning on engaging with my decisions in a way that also allows me to actually listen to the music I’m thinking of potentially downsizing. The urge to just plow through stuff and make impatient snap judgments is going to be pretty strong, and if I get bored with trying to figure out if a song’s worth salvaging in thirty seconds, well, why is it on my iPod in the first place?
That’s the bad news. The good news, aside from the fact that if sentiments change this stuff will still be on my hard drive to be added back if that situation arises, is that this also radically alters the way I prioritize a song as a “favorite”. Used to be that it wasn’t a favorite unless it was something I knew I’d listen to a ton, something that elicited a visceral or awestruck or deep-reverie reaction in me. But now, instead of half-aware coasts through non-committal experiences that are only broken with some more collar-grabbing moment, I’ll actually have to think that much deeper about songs I’ve already heard, maybe just a couple times, and half-forgotten. Why did I like this the first time I heard it, instead of tagging it with one star and deleting it from my library? Did I keep it out of obligation, or was it a legitimately intriguing track that, sadly, took a backseat to something more immediate? And if I dive into this headlong, with the addition of new music for review as the only diversion from this culling exercise, will I be sufficiently distracted from the security blanket of my Favorites playlist that the idea of what’s worth making a “favorite” shifts — subtly or drastically? And how much of this stuff is actually going to get weeded out at all?
